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For what it's worth I feel like there's a common thread in @xablor's post on voting and some of the replies to @zataomm's post on WWI that really ought to be broken out and examined on its own that being how exactly do we ascribe agency and responsibility.
It's trivially true that the current war in Ukraine could've been avoided had the Kievan Russ welcomed Moscow as liberators and acquiesced to their rule instead of choosing to fight. It's trivially true that World War 2 may have avoided or postponed if the Poles had acquiesced to being partitioned between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis instead of choosing to fight, or if the British Empire had valued Germanic notions of racial brotherhood over their own self-conception as World Hegemon/police or desire to adhere to previously made agreements.
But that's just the thing, they didn't, and the arguments that they ought to have seem to be relying on a lot of legwork that is not in evidence.
I recently read a book of CS Lewis' letters and essays including the full version of The Abolition of Man over the course of a cross-country flight, and it struck me as surprisingly relevant/contemporary for something that was written over 80 years ago now. It also reminded me of an argument between Habryka (or maybe Hlinka?) and some long-standing DR aligned poster from back in the day. I don't recall whether it was on LessWrong or in the CW thread on SlateStar codex but it was prior to the move to reddit and in anycase I can't seem to find it now. The jist of it was that it was impossible for an actor to be both moral and rational because having "moral principals" was effectively a precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances. IE While I know that I could easily get away with lying, cheating, stealing, or otherwise "hitting the defect button" and that it might even be in my personal interest do so, I won't do that because to do so would be wrong and right/wrong is something that trancends rational self interest.
For example I'd like to think we could all recognize that killing 77 men over a puppy and a car is wholy disproportionate and perhapse even a bit extreme but at the same time I would also like to believe that all but the most autistic of contrarians would agree that a world of men like Neo is preferable to one of men like Theon Greyjoy
I feel like this is something that Lewis saw clearly that a lot of otherwise intelligent commentators today do not. Namely, that it is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight that the British were idiots to abide by this agreement or that, but this must be whieghed against the question of what value does any agreement with the empire have once you've set the precident of reneging on any agreement the moment it looks like the bill might come due? After all, the thing that makes a debt a debt is the obligation to pay.
I feel like we see something similar in a lot of the rhetoric around voting and other forms civic duties. There seems to be this widely held belief that voting doesn't matter unless your specific vote gets to be the deciding vote but how dumb is that? how many elections are decided by one vote? and how do you decide which specific vote for candidate A or policy B out of however many is the deciding vote. It seems to me that the sanest, if not neccesarily most rational, approach is to stop asking dumb questions. Voting, even when your vote isn't neccesarily the deciding vote, has value for the same reason honoring your agreements has value. Doing so (or otherwise not doing so) tells the rest of the world something true about you.
How does the development of tools for mass murder in the world wars fit into the paradigm of ‘following the rules’? After the fact, the indiscriminate killings of civilian populations via bombings or starvation by the UK, US, USSR, and to a large degree Nazi Germany are treated ambivalently by contemporary recountings, while the discriminate killings were immortalized by the Nuremberg trials and have been written into the foundation of contemporary morality. ‘Don’t kill civilians’ is perhaps an unworkably high standard, but I’d much prefer if that was held to a bit more strongly than tripwire alliances designed to further geopolitical goals. The US was actually pretty good about not doing evil shit aside from a handful of bombings later into the war, and I’d like that to be that standard, which the indiscriminate and pointless night bombings of the British very much fall short of.
Following what rules exactly?
Why should the British be held as more culpable for waging a war to defend thier allies than those who attacked those allies in the first place?
Why should the pressence (or absence) of WMDs factor into the calculation at all?
Culpability isn’t a very useful metric when this stuff seems pretty overdetermined. Germany and France will try to unify Europe under their control, UK will try to stop said unification, Russia will try to expand the empire, Americans will sell stuff. The stuff I’d like to argue about is whether to treat a particular player as behaving in a respectable way or not. WWI, with all its slaughter, had its deaths concentrated among men explicitly waging the war, with some exceptions for starvation in Germany near the end. We don’t revile Germany for its behavior in that war today, because their conduct was within the relatively wide bounds of honorable conduct for that conflict. WWII on the other hand has widespread and unrelenting barbarity by nearly all players, excepting the US and France. The Germans are rightly reviled not because of their blitzkreig through Belgium but because they liked to kill civilian Jews for bad reasons. We too should revile the British approach of sending planes to scatter bombs indiscriminately amongst civilian German populations for different but still bad reasons.
Very few people care about the alliance between Poland and the UK because the alliance was explicitly built as a last-second deterrent for German expansion, not because the Polish and British governments had a long and close relationship of mutual protection. Local players had their own reasons for disliking said expansion, but from the American perspective there really wasn’t any reason why we should care.
If we aren't discussing culpability what exactly are we discussing?
Likewise while it is true that the US had no particular reason to care about Polish sovereignty in 1939, we arent talking about the US in 1939. We are talking about the Poles and the British, both of whom had very obvious reasons to care. The Poles because it was thier sovereignty being threatened and the British because they had made an agreement with the Poles.
If you want to argue that the Poles should've valued thier sovereignty less or that the British should have valued keeping thier word less that is your perogative, but at least make that argument explicit, and provide your reasons why.
Culpability shouldn’t be a binary thing, where if you throw the first punch I get to burn your family alive and that’s on you. Britain make a last-second alliance with Poland which failed to deter German expansionism, and after Germany beat France the capacity of Britain to win a direct conflict against Germany dropped to zero. The whole of Churchill’s maneuverings were to provoke Germany into committing an atrocity that would bring the US into the war, which he did by targeting civilian German populations. Germany was culpable for starting the conflict, absolutely, but Britain was responsible for escalating the conflict to a total war.
That's certainly a take.
Firstly, the British didn't initiate the bombing of civilian infrastructure and populations the Germans did, the British were just monumentally better at it because the British had more competent leadership and greater resources to draw upon.
Secondly, Churchill's maneuvering didn't bring the US into the war, the Japanese did. Even then, the US didn’t move against Germany directly until after Germany had declared war on the US and started attacking US shipping in the Atlantic.
Finally, the German decision making process looks especially retarded when you recall that they really ought to have known better. The Belgian example two decades prior had already demonstrated that the Anglos were both ready able to wage a costly war against Germany over the sovereignty of a stupid made up country.
The British sent bombers targeting Germany for IIRC 9 months before the Germans retaliated. I can’t speak to Germans bombing civilians in Poland, tho I would believe it.
On Churchill: yes. This is why Churchill sucks. He was a warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do. He was still responsible for pushing the RAF to terrorize the German civilian populous in the hopes that the Germans would retaliate in a way that would pull America into the war. Additional beef: Hitler’s offer to turn Madagascar into a Jewish-German colony was denied by Churchill because he wanted to maximize the number of mouths Germany had to feed on the continent. Decent odds Madagascar would have been turned into a charnel house anyway, but we won’t know thanks to Churchill.
Agree with Germany being dumb, but I think it was more that the Nazis thought that their struggles were due to a Jewish conspiracy that ran Europe, rather than perfidious Albion being perfidious. German theory-of-mind takes the L once again.
The Germans were the ones who opened Pandora's Box by bombing civilian infrastructure in the opening phase of their invasion of Poland. Meanwhile the RAF did not start intentionally targeting civilians until the Luftwaffe made night bombing and the targeting of population center official policy in the latter half of the Battle of Britain.
In short, your claim that the British were the ones to "escalate" the conflict is false.
I would consider the fact that Churchill's side won pretty much every every war he was involved in to be evidence to the contrary.
This is a very dumb objection for you to be making here. Either Churchill was a brilliant mastermind who played the German high command (and everyone else in the world) like a fiddle or he was a "warmonger who was terrible at war and failed at everything he tried to do". Pick one.
In either case it doesn't adress the issue that the US didn't move against Germany directly until after the Germans had declared war on the US and started shooting at American ships.
Finally "the Madagascar plan" wasn't even proposed until the summer of 1940. Not only were Britain and Germany already at war by that point but Madagascar wasn't even Germany's to give. Forget Churchill, what reason would anyone in the British leadership have to agree to that plan at that time?
Maybe if the Germans had used one of thier own colonies, or an ally's colony, or tried to cut a deal with the global hegemon instead of declaring war on them things would've played out differently but we don't live in that timeline.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original Kievan Russ community founded Moscow and then stationed there when the Mongols utterly destroyed Kyiv. They then re-colonized their old territory centuries later. From Wikipedia —
What happened to Kievan Russ is actually relevant to the topic. Kyiv decided to fight against the Mongols, which led to the total desolation of Kyiv and the destruction of the original Kievan Russ culture. Something similar happened to Baghdad. But the Slavs in Moscow decided to acquiesce to Mongol rule, which allowed for the salvation of Kievan Russ culture and the continuation of Russian Orthodoxy. So there are two important things to consider here: Moscow and Kievan Russ are historically the same culture / people, and history shows how delusional concepts of self-determination have destroyed Kyiv before — until, of course, Moscow liberated its former territories, because they chose to submit to the Mongol’s greater strength. (nota bene: being zero percent Slav, I don’t care about anything happening east of Poland, and having the Slavs destroy each other is as beneficial to the West as having the East Asians destroy each other or the Semites destroy each other. But I genuinely feel that there is something deeply wrong with the waste of life in the Russian-Ukraine war especially with Ukraine’s low TFR.)
Whether you're right or wrong is irrelevant.
What is rellevant is that Moscow thinks Kiev is Russian and Kiev disagreed stongly enough to go to war over the matter.
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You one part wrong: Moscow did not bend to the Mongols, it was destroyed. Vladimir (and others) bent. Vladimir had (vague) issues which led to people moving to Tver and Moscow, who then fought over Vladimir. But yes, the main part is right. Russia's national mythology's founded on bending to greater powers (like China, today.) For detail (since your main point is incoherent or evil to me):
The Kievan Rus was barely a single entity and disintegrated by 1100. Where the Holy Roman Empire for most of its existence was a very lose collection for a long period, the Kievan Rus was a section of the Rus (East Slavic lands, post facto held by Russia in the 19th century, but can also mean something like city state or East Slavic statelet). Somehow, this concept stretches far beyond Kiev's rule.
Novgorod's, Rostov's, Kiev's etc. territories are considered as one, because Yaroslav the Wise temporarily controlled them (but they didn't hold together afterwards.) Why consider Vladimir's efforts 100 years later part of Kiev, when at best, the connection by this point is Vladimir briefly conquering Kiev (after Ryazan) around 1150. None of these people wrote of themselves under the Kievan Rus or fighting for some past Kievan unity.
150-200 years after temporarily being together, Rostislav, Prince of Smolensk took Kiev (for 1 week). His son held Smolensk and Novgorod. His son took Kiev in 1215, then took Vladimir, losing Novgorod. In 2023, ~20 independent princes and Turkic tribes sent a host to fight the Mongols, half died. In 1237, Bantu Khan took Kiev. Other statelets like Novgorod and Smolensk were unaffected. The village of Moscow was destroyed at this time. A new Yaroslav asks the Mongols to become prince of Vladimir in 1238. When he dies, the Mongols give the eldest son Vladimir. The younger son, Alexander Nevsky is given (the ashes of) Kiev (not physically by their family). When the Khan died, they were to all go to Sarai and pledge allegiance, which Andrey didn't. The Mongol army returned, removed Andrey and gave Alexander Nevsky all of Vladimir's possessions. Alexander Nevsky then led a Mongol army back to Novgorod in 1259... His son, Daniel, born in 1261, founded a monastery and the first stone church in Moscow, ruling over Tver.
Records are sparse, but from 0 inhabitants in the 1240s, Moscow was able to wrest Vladimir from Tver in the 1300s, gaining the right to... Collect taxes for the Mongols. (You don't hear about Kiev again until the 1650s. The Western Eastern Slavs (ancestors of Belarusians and Ukrainians) had their own stories with/in/as Lithuania and Poland, using the Ruthenian literary language etc.) (Remember, the Polish national poem starts "Oh Lithuania, my native land..."!)
A far better connection between Kiev and Moscow forms from the 1660s, where Ukrainian statesmen, clerics and scholars move to Moscow and establish the structure of the Russian state, reform its church, found schools etc.
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It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022. If Ukraine welcomed their liberators in 2022 then who knows, maybe Ukrainians would end up in meat wave assaults against Poland or Baltics in 2025.
Recently there was an article in Czech media loosely titled Russian Border Ends Where it Recieves a Beating. There is large grain of truth in that, not only for Russia but also for other expansive empires.
Where did this bizarre term come from and why are people using it?
Maybe it's a combination of the terms "human wave" and "meat grinder", which both have been used to describe Russia's tactics in the current war.
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This has been a popular talking point in media, but it appears to be based on exactly nothing. There is nothing anywhere within Russian rhetoric to suggest that they have the slightest interest in Poland. Even the archetype of launching a surprise attack on Poland, Hitler, spent years talking about the Danzig issue before invading. While it was a surprise attack, Germany's motivation was not a surprise. Russian would need to not only launch a surprise attack, but would need a surprise motivation. Likewise, Russia's invasion of Ukraine did not have a "surprise motivation," but rather a motivation that was well-known and is consistent with Russian thought. The same would not be true of a hypothetical Poland invasion.
If you are such an expert, you know about Suwałki Gap. Russia could invade Poland using Ukrainian stormtrooperzz in order to protect the 40 miles gap while simultaneously marching into Baltics thus connnecting enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast with motherland, achieving its strategic goals. Exactly the reasoning why they invaded Ukraine to protect Crimea.
And what would be the response from NATO? Article 5 is weak,
So yeah, in alternative universe Russia gets Ukraine, invades Poland and Baltics in 2025 in order to protect Russian minority from “nazis”, and makes it fait accompli - just like with Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast and Zaporizhzhia oblast and Kherson oblast, that Russia already officially annexed. Germans would send helmets to Poland and US agonizes if sending Himars can cause WW3. Was not NATO expansion in 2002 grave mistake provoking Russians anyways? Nobody has to do anything.
Per Wikipedia, Mariupol was conquered by Russia in May 2022, months after the Putins special operation had been begun.
For NATO to be effective, it does not have to be 100% committed to starting WW3 over a few square miles. Instead, following the method EY outlines in planecrash, it would be sufficient to escalate with a probability which is high enough to make the expected value of the defection of your opponent negative. Even a low but finite probability of responding in a way which will eventually lead to nuclear escalation will be enough to outweigh the gain of a bit of territory.
I think that NATO reactions to an invocation of Article 5 would be quite different from Western reactions to the invasion of Ukraine for game theory reasons.
If a slice of Poland gets invaded, and the rest of NATO is like 'well, they have already ceded so much territory to Russia in '45, surely they can spare another 50 square kilometers', then NATO as a defensive pact is dead. There can be some discussion if present day Russia is a credible threat in the same way that the USSR at the height of the cold war was, but if it was, then the options would be simple. Either your soldiers now fight Russia in your neighbors territory, or they fight them in a year in your own country, or they end up fighting someone else for Russia in two years. So the least-bad option would be to support your allies in a conventional war.
Of course, there have been precious few large-scale conflicts between nuclear powers, so the likelihood of such conflicts staying conventional for long is unknown. But both sides would have an interest to cause attrition to their enemies nuclear capabilities, and at some point someone might decide that faced with the choice between losing the retaliatory capabilities of a missile sub or silo or escalating to a nuclear conflict, it is not in their interest to defer nuclear escalation any longer.
What do you even know about the conflict? Are you not aware of siege of Mariupol, one of the most hard fought battles in the war?
Exactly. Why even risk invoking article 5? Don’t you think?
Originally, you used the term
with reference to Mariupol.
From my understanding, that term can be phrased as "done deal" and generally refers to a party accomplishing their objective before their opponent has time to react. A central case would be Crimea: from my understanding, it was occupied before Ukraine was even aware that it was under attack and could deploy military units. Rather than reinforcing their battling troops, they would have had to mount a completely new counterattack.
A city under siege is the opposite of a done deal. Attacking besiegers to break the siege goes all the way back to the dawn of warfare. If you besiege a NATO city for a few months, NATO will be under a lot more pressure to act than if you manage to take it overnight and cease hostilities.
I used the term fait accompli in relation to Russian invasion of Poland and Baltics. If Russians invaded Suwałki Gap, preventing NATO to supply Baltics, then they could march into Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania in hours or days. Once established there, it would be fait accompli. What would remain is for US/Polish/German/Spanish and other NATO troops to spill blood in house-to-house urban/trench fight to liberate their former NATO allies from the south. I can already see how enthusiastic the coalition would be in that case.
Also Mariupol was a done deal. It was surrounded in 2 days after invasion, the rest was mopping up operation without anybody able to do anything about it, with Russian tanks in suburbs of Kyiv.
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You are saying that Russians do not consider Poland to be within the rightful Russian sphere of influence?
I think it barely matters. Even if article five isn’t invoked for some inexplicable reason, the resemblance to the interwar years is mostly superficial.
There’s a key difference; Poland would absolutely fucking shred a Russian invasion on a military level. Russia since the war began wasn’t even guaranteed on any given day to be the most powerful military in Ukraine.
Poland’s military spending and might is nowhere near the disparity that existed in the 30s when the Soviet Union was an emerging superpower.
If anything this war has revealed that the Russian military is a paper tiger riddled with incompetence and corruption. They’re laughable compared to the past, and demographics get worse for them each passing day.
They really are a third rate power at this point. If Ukraine, one of the poorest and most corrupt European nations, is giving them trouble even this deep into the third continuation war, then they don’t have a ghost of a chance at winning a war against Poland, or the Baltics, or Finland.
I’m very sympathetic to the DR in general but the Russia cope is absolutely bonkers, almost a perfect mirror image of the twitchy-eyed Ukraine boosters. That country is completely pozzed on almost every level.
It's funny how differently people see this war! I look at it and see the opposite- even with every single US-aligned nation around the world is sending Ukraine all the weapons they can spare, Ukraine is still steadily losing this war.
They've drafted basically every man they could find, sparing only the ones necessary to work the farms and keep their economy running, with patrols on the border stopping any man from leaving (but women are fleeing the country). Meanwhile, Russia has still not needed to send in the conscripts who make up the bulk of its army- it's still able to coast on just volunteers, prisoners, and foreign mercenaries, so the average Russian citizen isn't affected.
We laughed at how mighty the western GDP was- turns out GDP does not magically turn into real weapons. Instead, Russia and its allies continue to massively outproduce all the rest of us in artillery, which is what counts the most. The US makes something like 25,000 a month while Russia makes 250,000. Instead, Ukraine has to rely on what they can scavange from old Soviet nations- the big news lately was that Armenia has agreed to send them some stuff. Armenia, the arsenal of democracy! (meanwhile, North Korea is sending literally millions of shells to Russia)
We boasted about our high-tech superweapons that would make the old Soviet stuff look like a joke. It turns out that GPD-guided munitions are easy to electronically jam, long-range missiles are too expensive and few, and the wiz-bang F35 that's supposed to do everything is too precious to be risked in Ukraine. Instead, the most practical weapon seems to be cheap, simple drones manufactured in Iran.
It's not a quick, flashy war of maneuver, sure. It's a slow, grinding, war of attrition. But they're winning. It boggles my mind that people still seem to think that Ukraine is doing great and will be marching into Moscow any day now. We need to see the reality and adapt- either cut a deal that gifts Russia the donbass region, or massively increase the amount of aid going to Ukraine, and restructure the current arms industry to be suited for a serious war.
Tangent, but – it's not merely a question of production; the war has also revealed that Russian technology is able to adequately counter ours (usually, it seems, after an adjustment period). For instance, the Russians shot down our in-service anti-radiation missiles! That was perhaps predictable before the war, but I still think it's a BIG DEAL because US/NATO air superiority doctrine is premised around being able to destroy enemy SAM launchers with (among other weapons) anti-radiation missiles, and the Ruskies just...shot them down with the air defenses they were supposed to be targeting. And that's just one example of their ability to adopt to our drip-feeding them our most modern (surface) weapons systems at an inoculatory rate.
This really gets my goat since in a real no-holds-barred war with NATO where the first two weeks might be determinate, if it takes the Russians two weeks to adjust to our tactics, their ability to adjust eventually is no big deal. But if we give them that month to adjust now, they'll be better prepared if there's ACTUALLY a confrontation with NATO. And presumably so will Iran and China. (The one upside is that this knife cuts both ways; the West has a much better picture of Russian capabilities now.)
If you see the war as a way to manipulate NATO countries to US interests by ensuring they are weak and dependent on US military aid so that they do not develop their own, independent military and the foreign policy that is downstream from that, 'we' (the US) absolutely don't need to do either of these things. Letting Ukraine bleed dry and letting Putin station a massive, battle-hardened army rebuilt with modern technology on the Polish border is, from a certain point of view, a massive win for US foreign policy.
Whether or not that's actually the US goal here I obviously can't say but I can't help but notice that everything 'we' (the US) has done seems to be nudging things in that direction.
Nah, I don't believe that either side was that smart. The Russians thought they could drive into Kiev in a matter of weeks (which seemed to be what Western analysts also thought at the start of the war). Then Ukraine proved a lot more resolute than anyone expected. So then the US alliance showed up with hundreds of billions worth of high-tech military gear, and everyone thought that would be the end of the war as "orcs" led "human wave assaults" against our most expensive weapon systems. Turns out that didn't work so well either, like you said- they were able to find ways to, eventually, find ways to adapt and counter our weapons. So now we're stuck in this meatgrinder that no one ever wanted or expected, but it's a sunk cost and both sides still want to win.
On the one hand, I'm inclined to believe you! Everyone overestimates government competence.
On the other hand, here's some excerpts from a 2019 RAND report:
Obviously RAND hedges their bets here, and I don't mean to claim that they were clairvoyant, or anything. But while Western analysts underestimated Ukrainian resolve, RAND was able to correctly point out the very serious downsides to sending Ukraine more weapons well before the escalation of the conflict. And then...we sent them more weapons...and the war escalated exactly as RAND predicted it could.
Now, supposing that you are a member of the US diplomatic-security apparatus that is concerned about Russian strength (and, let's say, sharing the common belief that Ukraine will not stand up to Russian might), but also nursing the unspoken (but very defensible) belief that a united Europe with an independent foreign policy is more of a threat to the United States over the long term than Russia will ever be. Just going off of this report, all of the things that RAND outlines as "risks" might look to you like "benefits," since you suspect that Russia invading and annexing more of Ukraine will "spook" Europe and increase diplomatic pressure on Germany to stop placing nice with Russia. Now increasing military aid looks like a win-win: you either weaken Russia or you spook Europe and with any luck you manage to thread the needle and do both by making the Russians look boorish and violent without them actually committing. And, as a strategist, an option where the worst plausible scenario has hidden benefits is a good option.
Things, in this postulation, DON'T go to plan: you're not omni-competent, the needle isn't threaded, Putin actually invades instead of just suffering from the weapons you've been shipping to Ukraine. How do you spin that situation?
I think what we've seen out of DC is consonant with that – pressuring Europe to give away their arsenal to Ukraine and buy American-made weapons systems instead.
Now, to your point, I don't even know that it requires the level of conscious thought I've put into it, just a sort of self-advantage-maximalizing sensibility, to get the most for the least. Maybe there's no grand strategy, just a sort of shrewd subconscious impulse. But I do find it very interesting that the "US diplomatic and military failure" DOES seem to have turned out in a way to have maximized US leverage over Europe and weakened them considerably. We replaced reliance on Russia for natural gas with reliance on the United States. We persuaded our NATO allies to give away, what, 500 tanks (many in service) while we have a few thousand Abrams in storage, of which we sent...1% (31). (Incidentally, I believe the reason given for not using more Abrams was that the logistics tail was too long. And while I do believe the logistics tail would be long, if we take this at face value it seems to suggest that we wouldn't be able to support Abrams in Europe during a conflict with Russia, which seems...problematic if true!)
So while I'm very uncertain as to how much of what has developed was planned, and I definitely agree that neither side was smart enough to correctly foresee the exact twists and turns of all these events, the extent to which it's undercut Europe to the benefit of the US is worth asking questions about, I think, but I rarely see it discussed.
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You’ve missed my point entirely and in a hilarious way sort of made my point about the discourse surrounding Russia for me.
I never said Ukraine was winning, I never even implied it. I was really talking about the supposed other targets of Russia; Poland & The Baltics. I have no doubt that Russia could win this war given enough time and bloodshed, time and numbers are on their side.
The crux of my point was that Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target and Russia still can’t manage it without enormous difficulty. They might win, they might not. If I had to bet money I’d bet money on Russia winning.
I have basically no dog in this fight but seeing Russia get its nose bloodied by Ukraine is like seeing a tatted up security guard getting their teeth knocked out by a 90lb twink; Turns out the muscleman was hopped up on bullshido and an inflated ego. Even with material support from the west, the arc of the war reveals a lot about the state capacity; all it took was a couple thousand mercenaries to turn around to legitimately threaten the regime. You’d expect that from some tinpot African authoritarian regime, but it was shocking to see that happen in Russia.
All your points on the desiccation of the western arms capability I fully agree with. But that has precedent; nothing reveals what technology is cost effective and practical like field testing in combat. And military spending in Poland and the Baltics are ramping up and have been for a while. Russia’s military capability or lack thereof has been largely revealed, and countries other than the USA and its satrapies and Russia have agency as well.
I think Russia winning the war might not actually improve the Russian position all that much. It’s not cope, I couldn’t give a fuck about the GAE. But every other country on Russia’s border are hardening against them, both politically and militarily. Aside from maybe Moldova, there are no easy targets left. Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.
Ukraine is not Liechtenstein! It is not Monaco! They have an army of 1.2 million men and women. When you figure in the aid they have something like a two trillion dollar military budget. They have a territorial area that’s equivalent to France and Germany combined, giving them significant ability to use defense in depth. They have been fighting Russia since 2014, which has given them a significant amount of combat experience that most NATO countries do not have. And those years allowed them to build up a fearsome network of fortifications and bunker systems all along the DPR/LPR border. There’s a reason they got picked to be the buffer state over Poland, and it’s not because they’re an easy nut to crack. To assume that Ukraine is the “easy mode” before having to take on the NATO final boss is foolishness.
Is it? Russia is almost five times the population of Ukraine and militarily supposedly one of the mightiest nations on earth. Russia is noticeably richer and more advanced than Ukraine, and incredibly it’s less corrupt which is absolutely wild.
Lots of smart people thought the Russians would crush Ukraine in a matter of weeks, it’s incredibly impressive on Ukraine’s part that they didn’t. And equally embarrassing for Russia.
Ukraine is largely flat and featureless. Afghanistan it is not. Yes it’s a buffer state but historically buffer states come in many flavors; Ukraine’s particular brew is the easily traversed crossroads type.
A lot has happened between now and then of course, but this whole excercise is, on my end, indicative of the relative weakness of Russia.
Poland, even without NATO protection, is obviously a huge problem for Russia. This whole thread stated with me basically saying that the idea of Russia throwing its weight against Poland is absurd, so I’ll spell it out.
Poland is roughly the same population as Ukraine, with tougher and more diverse terrain, and has had greatly heightened peace-time military spending for years. It’s much richer, more advanced, less riddled by corruption, more homogeneous, and has a much higher state capacity.
And there’s no reason to believe that the ramp up that Poland could achieve would be any less spectacular than Ukraine’s. In fact there seems to be sufficient evidence for the opposite conclusion.
While Russia is clearly not on the ropes and it appears to me that they’re winning, it also appears clear that their regime is pretty brittle and couldn’t sustain the heightened war state to even look seriously at directly messing with Poland or the Baltic countries, or even Finland.
Even in its current fake and gay state, NATO would absolutely eat Russia alive. I can’t believe this is even remotely controversial to stay.
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Pre-war, I assumed this would be true because of the EXTREMELY mediocre showing of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Crimea. But (pretty obviously) the Ukrainians did a lot of work between then and the second Russian invasion.
And if you set aside the question of Ukrainian morale, I don't think they are an embarrassingly easy target at all, on paper. They had a very large inherited ground army, and a large population pool. They're more on the level of Poland, not a softer target (say) Estonia or Latvia or even a medium-hard target like Finland. It's true from what I can tell that their weapon modernization was fairly meh and that their air force in particular was probably lackluster (but see also Poland, which is still flying Su-17s!) but the fundamentals (lots of tanks, artillery, warm bodies) go a long way with proper morale. I think that, e.g. non-US NATO would have struggled to invade Ukraine the same way Russia did.
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While they lowered their top draft age recently to 25, the fact that 18-25-year-olds are still not getting drafted should by itself prove that Ukraine is, in fact, not drafting (even "basically") every man they can find.
Man come on, at least read the full sentence:
Ukraine is a low-tech economy and needs its young men to work the farms and mines. They're not being given a vacation. They're part of the war effort just as much as if they were fighting on the front lines.
Seems very unlikely that all the young men are still just in the farms and the mines, considering that the universities are still running and so on.
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As far as I can tell, observations so far are inconsistent with that model of reality. Why did Russia not attempt to absorb (at least some part of) Georgia when it was lying flat and defeated in 2008, and could have been easily cut off any prospective allied supplies? Why did they wait until 2022 to attack the rest of Ukraine, giving them time to sort out their political turmoil and overhaul their army? There is little there to suggest that they have the cupidity or ambition to pay the blood toll to make their geopolitical situation better; even the war we are seeing now only suggests that they are paying just barely enough to not let it become much worse (as starting a war only to lose it would inevitably do), that is, they are driven by fear/desperation. (No mobilization, no assassination of leadership, barely even any escalation apart from the power plant bombing that they only did briefly during their "darkest hour")
The leadership of the Baltics asserting that they are afraid of being attacked by Russia is not even a signal of them actually believing this (let alone of it actually being likely), because it would be advantageous for them to claim that and fan the Ukraine war even if they were privately assured that it would never happen. Before 2022 the general dynamics of EU politics was such that the smaller countries of the Eastern periphery were constantly being shoved around by Germany on account of its economic might, which as we now have found out was hanging by the thread of cheap Russian hydrocarbons. Being Ukraine's main supporters and playing up the threat to themselves put them at the top of the list for receiving American military aid (or at least newer gear from countries further west in "ring exchange" schemes). It also no doubt plays well with their populations, many of whom still embrace revenge fantasies against Russia for 45 years of communism (not to mention the leaders themselves, who often are old men who were already politics-adjacent back then and thus personally faced the business end of the red boot).
Because Russia continues to believe that maintaining Abkhazia and South Ossetia as "independent" (without actually recognizing them) offers it influence on Georgian internal politics. If it stopped believing that it is very likely that it would first recognize them and then graciously allow their entry to Russian Federation, at least for South Ossetia, the same way as with DPR and LPR.
Russian tanks were in Gori, 25km from the capital, for several days, and if I remember correctly the Georgian resistance was reduced to the level of shootouts with civilian police units. There's little doubt that they could have pushed into the capital and simply installed a puppet government for a tiny fraction of the losses they have taken in Ukraine, which would have allowed them far more influence on Georgian internal politics, if they were actually interested in conquest/expansion beyond not losing what they already had (Abkhazia and South Ossetia).
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You have interesting observations, but I think they are far from trivial. A lot of arguments from incredulity and building up some intricate narratives about which country really thinks what.
While on my side I have facts: Russia annexed Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk. And they definitely are using LDR and DPR troops as cannon fodder in their latest war, so in fact welcoming Russians did not bring them peace.
Nah, those reconstituted forces are mostly filled with contract soldiers from Russia now. By summer of 2022, they had been destroyed and the cannon fodder spent. The DPR itself announced over 50% casualties in 2022, after they'd already conscripted almost (3/4) every male 18-65. They literally closed down mines and factories, conscripting their entire workforces. 2 years after, no one is left.
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They are mostly facts (except for the "cannon fodder" part, which by its standard definition also imputes a particular speculative motivation), but I don't understand how these facts are evidence either against the point you were addressing originally (that if all of Ukraine had capitulated immediately, they would have had peace) or the additional hypotheses that you added (which are no less of an intricate narrative) that Russia would have assaulted Poland or the Baltics because they supposedly really think that they can expand their borders up to the point where they receive a beating. That Georgia essentially capitulated to Russian demands, was not annexed even though an annexation would have been well within Russian capabilities, and is now at peace, and no Abkhazians or South Ossetians are being sent to fight against Georgia, is also a fact.
I am honestly a bit baffled by the reasoning in your post. Abstracting over the identities of the participants, it seems to amount to something like: A is fighting against B and C over something, and tells B and C that if they just stop resisting, they will no longer have to fight. B joins A, so now it's A and B against C. You come along and observe that B is still fighting (with A against C). Therefore, you conclude that A's initial claim that if B and C both capitulated there would be no fight is false. After all, B capitulated and is still fighting, and perhaps even if C capitulated D would have come along and have had a fight against A, B and C together.
Sure, let me help. This was my original post as a response to quoted part. What are you baffled about exactly?
It absolutely is not trivially true, in fact it is trivial to prove the opposite. People in Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea welcomed their Moscow liberators in 2014 and ended up being conscripted as cannon fodder for Moscow's new war with Ukraine in 2022.
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So Russia has recent history of using conquered peoples to wage future expansionist wars. What is the bafflement again?
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There are times when fighting against the odds is wise and times where it is unwise. Let's examine the death toll for WW2 amongst various powers:
Denmark lost 0.16% of its population, barely a scratch. Surrendering quickly to Germany served them well. The US lost 0.3%. The UK, Belgium, France and Italy suffered around 1%. Czechoslovakia suffered around 2-3%, mostly Holocaust deaths as opposed to military deaths. Romania - 3%. Japan 3-4%. Hungary, 5-9% (a large number of Holocaust deaths plus they did a fair bit of fighting, like Romania).
Yugoslavia, 6-10%. Germany, 8%. Greece, 7-11%. The Soviet Union: 14%. But by far the hardest hit was Poland at 17%. Of course, all these countries faced widely different threats, some were luckier in their position than others, some took on much greater challenges.
However, nobody lost more than the Poles in WW2, nobody left that war in a worse position than Poland. Germany was partitioned but at least some got to escape communism. The Poles ended up being pushed westward, losing a fair few cities and enormous numbers of people. And they had to suffer another 45 years of communism.
Polish late interwar leaders faced a clear and unpleasant choice - Germany or Russia. They chose neither and got demolished by both. This was a terrible decision. Moral principles dealt them a crushing blow that the country has scarcely recovered from today. How many millions of people is standing up for freedom and independence worth? My country escaped lightly with 0.58%, yet 0.58% is still an enormous death toll! That was 60 COVIDs for us, targeting the young rather than the old. We in the Anglosphere suffered very little in the last 200 years, we were nearly always the strongest and won the most important wars. Yet we have a vast apparatus of war memorials and reverence for those sacrificed in war. Can we even imagine the sacrifices that others have made?
I have more sympathy for the Czech leaders who escaped total disaster than the Poles who plunged their country into catastrophe. Sometimes surrendering is the best course of action. We can only imagine the internal feelings of those who proudly chose death before dishonour, only to receive double portions of both.
Respect for agreements, obligation and one's reputation are secondary to the core health of the nation.
There is no plausible scenario in which we emerge from the war in a meaningfully better condition.
We ally with the USSR? Today's invasion might get postponed slightly, but the Soviets would still enter the eastern territories and loot under the guise of help. Katyń might not happen in 1940, but these officers would be probably killed after the war, like e.g. Pilecki. The nightmare march westward in 1945 during which Soviets raped basically every encountered woman between the ages of 10 and 80 would still happen. The latter is most certain out of those, as it historically did happen post-Barbarossa, when we were technically allied with USSR. After the Yałta, instead of a satellite state, we could have ended up as a fully fledged Soviet republic, which means the next 45 of oppression are some 50% worse.
We ally with the Reich? They had no scruples breaking Ribbentrop-Mołotow, why would they have any breaking a (highly implausible, ahistorical) Ribbentrop-Beck? (Seriously, the guy who I entrust my life to w/r/t historical knowledge, who is not a normie but a Mishima-and-Evola-reading /ourguy/, completely thrashes the linked book). The Nazis would still shell and bombard us eventually. The Holocaust would still have happened, maybe worse are the government would be collaborating with the German war-death complex instead of resisting it.
But long term, the worst would come after the war. See, nobody cares too much about Vichy Government these days, or the Swiss, or how Sweden supplied Germans with steel. That is because they had decades to wage a successful diplomatic and propaganda campaigns to bleach their history. Hell, pretty much nobody holds a grudge against Germany now. But Poland would be a poor satellite state, unable to have significant democratic relations with the west. What is nowadays a relatively fringe position would be a mainstream one: all the responsibility for the Holocaust would be offloaded from Germany to Poland. We would remain a pariah state for centuries. We might have not get allowed into the EU and NATO, and become a Belarus-style authoritarian backwater. The war that is happening right now across our border might have been happening on our soil instead.
That would be extremely unlikely, Soviets had no plans for so like they had with Finland (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelian_Autonomous_Soviet_Socialist_Republic )
Or Poland could same position as Yugoslavia, socialist in a name but without any Soviet armies on it, being a member of non-aligned and trading with everyone.
AFAIK in countries where governments and local population resisted it, Holocaust did not happen, including even German allies until Germans couped them when Germans saw they were losing the war. I.e. SS officials come to Italian officials, and said "we need a list of Jews -- Ok, come back next month" next month: "Please give us the list -- Sorry, we didn't do it, come back next month please".
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Here's another idea: how about offering Czechoslovakia military assistance in the face of a potential German invasion instead of grabbing the opportunity of taking part in its territorial mutilation in 1938?
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This is just made-up. There is no reason to think that Russia might have a significantly greater chance of invading Poland based on a point of divergence some 80 years ago. Nobody can predict what would happen over such a time period. The decision not to pick one of the two choices INCREASED the chance of Russian invasion, it didn't lower it. The Ribbentrop-Beck pact book is nonsense (why would Germany invade Western Europe if allied with Poland?) that doesn't mean all variations of similar ideas are nonsense.
This is also ahistorical, Hungary collaborated. Romania collaborated eagerly. Various Soviet minorities were happy to liquidate Jews. Yet responsibility still lies with Germany. It's not as though Hungary and Romania have enormous influence in world opinion to cover up their misdeeds.
Ally with Germany and hand over Danzig in exchange for parts of Belorussia. Ally with Russia and get gains at Germany's expense (presumably more than received in real life).
Both of those are more realistic options than spurning both powers. There is absolutely no reason to think that the world is fair, that vast suffering is compensated for with rewards of any kind.
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While I agree that the inter-war Polish leadership played their bad hand badly, I don't see what the likely good outcome for Poland or the Poles is if you assume that Hitler's grand strategy was to pursue Grossreich and Lebensraum - which is what Hitler had said his grand strategy was when speaking to sympathetic audiences ever since he wrote Mein Kampf. Grossreich, even in its benign form of reversing Versailles, implies the annexation by Germany of the parts of western Poland with large ethnic-German minorities and the reduction of the ethnic Polish population of that territory to second-class citizenship. And the available Lebensraum was either in Poland or beyond it. If Poland allies with Hitler, the eventual double-cross is even more overdetermined than Barbarossa was.
Quite apart from Hitler's designs on Poland itself, any timeline where Hitler eventually attacks the Soviet Union involves Poland being ravaged by the German army on the way out and the Soviet army on the way back. This includes the scenario where Poland allies with the Soviet Union - the fact that Barbarossa happened in our timeline is strong evidence that Hitler would have invaded Soviet-allied Poland, particularly as Poland doesn't benefit from the Anglo-French guarantee in this scenario and the Spanish Civil War is a precedent that no Western country is likely to kick up a fuss if Hitler attacks Communists. Realistically, without western help Nazi Germany curbstomps the Soviets, but even if you rate the Red Army as better ex ante than it turns out ex post the best outcome is that the Soviets successfully defend Poland and Poland ends up de facto occupied by Soviets. The only reason Finland gets Soviet client-state status on as generous terms as they do is that they demonstrated the ability to give the Soviets a bloody nose, something the Poles don't have.
So to get a good outcome, you need Hitler to stop. And you pretty much need him to stop voluntarily - the way things played out in our timeline is strong evidence that the process of making him stop probably involves armies crossing Poland in a way which is catastrophic for the civilian population. The military scenario where Britain and France take the initiative in the phony war period and quickly defeat Germany isn't plausible militarily, and even if it was there was nothing Poland could do to make it more likely. Once you accept that, Polish policy looks sane (though incompetent).
In any case, if you don't count Holocausted Jews then Poland's death toll is in the normal range for eastern Europe. One of the dirty secrets of Polish history is that the pre-war Polish government would not have counted Holocausted Jews when evaluating their own performance.
In real history Poland was moved westward by Stalin. The Germans could've moved Poland eastwards, taken Danzig and so on while giving them land from Russia and Belarus. If there was one thing Russia has no shortage of, it's land. Or if they'd fought alongside Russia, they would've surely gotten more land in the peace and better treatment. The Russians treated Romania better than Poland since Romania switched sides.
There was no good outcome on offer, that's my point. The Poles ordered 'good outcome' in the restaurant and they received a double helping of bad outcome.
Territorially and demographically, it makes sense to pick a nearby ally with a strong army. The Poles did not do this and suffered immensely. One German invasion, one Soviet invasion then at the end of the war another Soviet invasion.
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That's certainly... a take. What exactly were they supposed to do? Their country had only recently been created- until recently their land was part of Russia and Germany, so it's natural that both of those countries wanted it back. Is there some alternative universe where they voluntarily surrender to the USSR and then Germany just leaves them alone?
Literally any other option would have been a better idea than putting trust in a British defense guarantee.
but you would trust a nazi or soviet defense guarantee? Sometimes there just aren't any winning options.
A neighboring state can at least conceivably provide military assistance. Britain cannot.
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Also, correct me if in wrong but was it really resistance to the Nazis/Soviets that caused the deaths or that they ended up being a battleground between the soviets and Nazis as well as having a disproportionate number of Jews? Their disproportionate suffering was due to geography and demographics, not diplomacy.
It seems to me that much of the destruction would have happened either way, but there being a small outside chance that the soviets/Nazis would leave them alone and route around them if they got deterred by the British security guarantees.
Either of the parties routing around them seems like an unrealistic prospect considering their location. In hindsight, the strategy that would probably have preserved the most Polish lives (if perhaps not other things that the Poles valued) would have been to immediately and enthusiastically join one of the two warring parties, preferably the Nazis as they had the initial momentum behind them. The extra ~30m population and industrial base would have probably made enough of a difference to turn the Battle of Moscow into an Axis victory, rapidly putting us in an alternative history timeline where it does not seem so likely that Poland is turned into a primary battleground again anytime soon.
...and then American nukes hitting German cities, not touching Poland?
Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite without having an invasion army lined up to follow up, and a German victory in Russia surely would have put any Normandy plans at least a few years behind schedule - long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up, at which point there would just be MAD.
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Ally with Germany against Russia or ally with Russia against Germany. At least then the balance of power wouldn't be totally against them. They would have at least one vaguely friendly power nearby, rather than two enemies.
Either one necessitates sacrifices. Both countries wanted land back. But what did Poland's policy of equidistance between Germany and Russia get them, other than megadeaths? They got the worst possible outcome, Russia and Germany allying against them.
Ally with a power whose leader considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life' and brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in? Seems unwise.
Of course, we know with hindsight that the Soviet Union would also end up conducting genocides on its subject peoples (like the Holodomor and similar genocides that Stalin carried out).
I can't say I blame them for choosing none of the above.
He showed up for Pilsudski's funeral and really liked the man.
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Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.
Even more ahistorical. Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland. Not that there were no reasons for Beck to be suspicious of Hitler's apparently moderate stance -- obviously he would not have allowed Poland to remain an equal partner forever even under the best circumstances. But up to this time, Germany's re-expansion had been accomplished without bloodshed and his demands of Poland were not unreasonable, as even the British had generally agreed until they issued their defense guarantee at the last minute, fueling Polish recklessness.
The Polish leadership were more afraid of genocide at the hands of the Soviets than of the Nazis.
He may not have used that exact quote, but he wasn't secret about his views about the Slavs.
He talks extensively in Mein Kampf about subjugating the entirety of Eastern Europe. More to the point, he actually did it.
This was after the war started, after his initial plans were thrown into confusion by Britain's unexpected (because irrational, unfulfillable, and at odds with earlier policy) guarantee to Poland. Hitler insisted even in e.g. private communiques with his generals that he wanted no war with Poland.
His foreign policy record up to that point was that of an able, calculating (if ambitious) diplomatist, not of a megalomaniac who would accept nothing less than the prompt extermination of all racial enemies. In Mein Kampf, he definitely does not present a vision of German annexation let alone genocide of all of Eastern Europe. What he does repeat a number of times is the need for more "living space" while gesturing vaguely to the east (or Russia and her vassal states as the Wikipedia quote has it, i.e., not Poland) and talking up the Bolshevik threat. 90% of his vitriol is reserved for Jews and Communists. The Slavs as such are spoken of in a way more reminiscent of the way the Irish were discussed by Anglo-American conservatives during their early waves of immigration: domestically (in Austria), they pervert democratic institutions with their lower standard of culture and their pursuit of ethnic interest, and take up political space that should belong to the Austrian/Anglo majority. His overarching foreign policy objectives were 1. the destruction of Communism (and, similarly in his eyes, European Jewry), 2. the reunification of existing ethnically German regions under one government, and 3. the colonization of some of Eastern Europe. Since the Poles at least shared Hitler's hostility to Communism, it was hardly a given that genociding them would have been his first choice. As I said before, the Polish leadership recognized this: Soviet policy posed a greater existential risk. In the short term at least, the alliance probably would have been treated similarly to how the Romanian alliance was in fact treated later on: mercenarily, like alliances on both sides of the war, not as a conscious stalling tactic to prepare for their eventual genocide.
Edit: This may downplaying Hitler's imperiousness. The point is that whatever he had in store for the Poles, it was probably better than the predictable consequences of their refusal to accept the weakness of their position.
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I may be missing some information about "rationalists" or some history about the discussion of rationalists on the motte. But I am confused by the idea that moral commitments and rationalist commitments would be opposed.
Do rationalists believe that there are moral commitments that are more rational than others? My assumption would be that rationalists would consider moral commitments to be axioms and therefore a requirement to even discuss morality, and that to be morally rational would be to derive positions from your moral axioms in a consistent way. For example, as described by Rawls when he discuses "reflective equilibrium" - the psychological state of having all of your moral axioms be aligned consistently such that you are generally protected against cognitive dissonance because in an argument people cannot show that your moral axioms contradict each other.
I assume some level of moral relativism to be associated with rationalism, and that that is generally not an issue only because most rationalists share moral axioms - they basically share enlightenment morals. But surely you could be rational and have radically different axioms.
To be rational is to rationally extend ones moral principles rationally. Why would it be irrational to behave in line with ones moral principles?
Rationalists subscribe to utilitarianism, which in and of itself is incoherent moral philosophy. It has two main problems:
Inability to define utils. Utils are mired with inconsistencies, it is hard to put against each other suffering vs pleasure. Many rationalists evade this as principle of minimizing suffering, but even then there is a problem of comparison: is sand grain in an eye of 1,000 people worse than broken arm of one person?
Time inconsistency of utils. Actions that decrease utils today may increase them tomorrow. Existential comics has a good example for trolley problem in that vein.
The word "rationally" does a lot of heavy lifting here, as it assumes utilitarianism. Let's say I subscribe to virtue ethics, which says that I cannot commit murder. But then a rationalist comes and says "hey, if you kill Hitler in his crib, you will prevent countless murders in the future". Wrong, this is not going rationally about my moral assumptions, it is assuming completely different moral system.
A bit of a tangent, but I can't really read existential comics anymore after seeing his twitter.
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Just speaking for myself, I’m in favor of real politik. The most important axioms: ought implies can, and policies exist to serve the nation.
The first is pretty simple. If you’re not in a position to honor the treaty without serious damage to yourself, then don’t do it. If the enemy is stronger than you are, the only thing you get for entering a war is the death of your own people. You aren’t even going to really stand up for the treaty, and will prove to everyone else that you can’t.
The second is just a principle for political survival. If you’re constantly getting involved in conflicts because of morals you’re wasting the resources of your country and getting little for it. Your military doesn’t get stronger because of your morals. People can’t eat morals. And wars by nature have a real cost that will be carried by your nation. As such, I think it’s rather important to have a good strategic reason for a war. It could be materials access, or the ability to project power, it could be to shore up an important ally, or access to markets, but it has to be a reason that you can articulate and that serves the good of the nation you’re leading.
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I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality
I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.
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If we're talking about LessWrong Rationalists, then the whole idea behind learning to be rational is that "Rationalists Should Win."
They should achieve their instrumental goals at minimal cost and end up with more utility points than when they started.
But having rigid 'moral principles' implies there are personal rules that you simply will not break. And if another rational actor knows you have rules you won't break, they can exploit those rules to reliably defeat you in any given contest. Here "defeat" just means "increase their own utility even at the expense of your utility."
One particularly silly example is if you had the moral rule "Never physically hurt women." Then your opponent could just pay a woman to come around and beat you up and take your stuff whenever they wanted, knowing you probably won't fight back.
If you have certain rules governing your behavior that you NEVER will alter, you're precommitting to certain actions that can lead to you 'losing,' which means you're making a 'precommitment to behave irrationally in specific circumstances' and thus not being fully 'rational' since, as above, "Rationalists should win."
You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.
When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)
Oh is this going to be one of those arguments.
Yeah, now its just a question of how recursive you want to get. Defecting makes sense in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma when you have no way of judging that the other party might be willing to cooperate. Iterated games, if they're of indefinite length present different strategic options.
I wasn't even agreeing with the premise of "moral principles force you to act in an irrational way." Just pointing out the potential contradiction if you want to 'win' you might have to bend or break certain moral principles, which was the gist of the original question.
Indeed, I think the whole point of invoking morals as principles rather than as 'mere' variables in a utility function, some principles exist because they DO create better outcomes in a systemic way, even if it leads to 'losing' a few local contests. As you say, 'being the sort of person' who does the Good thing even at personal cost will probably create many more utils over the long run.
But there are indeed some moral principles which can be systemically exploited and if your principles cause you to repeatedly lose, you're not being 'rational' on your own terms.
But then we're back to the question: what do you value and is it easier to maximize your utility by following certain moral guiding principles even when it leads to 'losing' a few isolated games, or by being completely unprincipled other than trying to maximize your own utility in every single game you encounter and adapt your strategy accordingly.
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That's an odd reading of yud there. Rats pull heavily from game theory and a (perhaps the) prototypical game theory question is how to avoid losing the prisoner's dilemma. Continually hitting the defect button is losing. You are flushing utils down the toilet. If a rationalist should win here, they should find ways to obtain credible pre-commitments and not ferret around for a way to get one over down the line.
Ah, but that's only if you're actually in an iterated game.
Some people might correctly model an interaction as a one-shot game with a new stranger every single time, with no mutual knowledge or expectations established beforehand. In that case, hitting 'defect' will let you win in cases where the other side magnanimously chooses cooperate.
If you go into an interaction knowing you're pitted against person who will choose 'cooperate' on principle, and you don't expect to have repeated interactions with that person, you can 'win' by defecting because you 'know' you're escaping scott-free in that case.
Indeed, I don't know of any prisoner's dilemma tournaments where the 'cooperate every time' strategy wins.
With all that said, I'm agreeing that if you take it up one level, being the 'sort of person' who cooperates when faced with such a dilemma creates a much better world, and thus will likely create more utility for you, and for all other players, which can certainly compound over time.
So adopting the moral principle that loses you individual games can still make you the overall winner.
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Even more simply, it could have been averted by not creating conditions for a coup in Ukraine and then not psyopping the Ukrainians into thinking US is going to help them win a war against Russia. And you were telling them exactly that - it's even on video.
Two high profile senators talking, on camera, about "taking the fight to the Russians" and that US will give them all they need is pretty unequivocal in my book.
Voting is mostly a mechanism for farming legitimacy: "you voted for this, here eat it". It gives people the illusion that they may change some outcome. Seeing how it's gone with migration in Europe, it's pretty clear voting doesn't really work and you don't get to vote on judges and especially international courts which are making it impossible for states to run their own territories in a sane manner. If it's even threatening to start to maybe work then you get calls to ban the new parties, as with AfD.
It doesn't matter that policy is written by think-tankers or NGOs and that representatives don't even read what they vote on.
What does this refer to? Googling "taking the fight to the Russians" just brings up statements that have been made after February 2022.
When it comes to statements made before the invasion, Biden - a figure of considerably more importance regarding US Ukraine policy than "two senators" - was quite clear in December 2021 that US is not going to send in the troops. When it comes to other aid, US and West have offered Ukraine more of it and taken bigger risks than just about anyone would have predicted before Feb 2022.
They didn't say they were going to send troops. They said they're going to give Ukraine everything it needs to win though, and press 'the case against Russia' and so on. Politico article on the visit. Video of the speech
I believe the plan was something like a fork in chess - give aid and support to Ukraine so it crushes the rebels and thus also wrecks Putin's domestic support and international prestige, or force Russians to intervene in which case you can paint them as a horrible danger to Europe and impose more sanctions and wreck European trade with Russia, which directly benefits you as they're forced to buy more from Canada and the US. Whatever reaction Russia does, it loses. Pretty basic plan but it can't help but work.
You are right. Almost no one did, but people in Ukrainian politics thought US would take even bigger risks. Check the image. And perhaps also the video of Arestovych talking about the situation.
[Here's a video from 2019 of then presidential advisor Arestovich] explaining the situation as he sees it, and casually stunning the interviewer with frankly speaking about a large-scale war with Russia. I don't really fault much of the analysis, except for the bit saying that a "major war" is a price worth paying for not being in a Russian led union. The fate of Bulgaria isn't one to envy, and that's what'd have awaited Ukraine, at best.. Fodder to keep the population shredder of the EU going for a bit longer. Why would anyone stay in a corrupt & poor state riddled with political strife when they can move abroad easily ?
It's funny how it neatly ties all it together. He says that NATO members weren't certain about taking in Ukraine - but Skripal affair, the airliner shootdown, coup in Montenegro and Syria made it clear they have to oppose Russia by accepting Ukraine.
Skripal affair was, to a 99.99% probability, a psyop done by someone in the British state. There's no other explanation for the utterly unlikely presence of one Britain's highest ranking military medical officers on the scene. It was really weird and poisoning a guy you exchanged who wasn't even very nasty doesn't make sense.
The airliner shootdown might have been malicious, in the sense that Ukrainians did not close their airspace over the area after losing a big jet to a SAM missile. Whether that was deliberate or incompetence is unclear. And as to Syria and the refugee wave caused by the war Americans supported and possibly caused, and in which they supported Al-Qaeda and allegedly also ISIS.
Grand strategy is a pretty nasty affair, the stakes are basically infinite so it's of course going to be absurd.
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